The colonel did not answer for a full minute, and when he spoke a pleading note had come into his voice, a note so unusual that his wife glanced quickly at him. "Mary, it's these doctors and things, this damned long illness of mine has been the very deuce. If it hadn't been for that money of Henrietta's I don't know where we'd have been, but I'm not the man to spend my children's money on myself." He drew himself up painfully and his face flushed. "No, Mary, if Henrietta wished to make me feel that I'd no right to it, I wouldn't touch a penny that I couldn't pay back. If the damned unsisterly old devil is able to understand anything at all in the next world, I hope she understands that!" "But, James, have we borrowed some of the children's money?" "A little," he admitted. "We've had to. After all, the children would be in a bad way without their father. I consider it my duty to keep myself alive for their sakes. Where would you all be without me?" he concluded with some return of his old manner. Mrs. Ogden looked at him; he was a very broken man. A faint pity stirred in her, a faint sense of shock as though there were something indecent in what she was now permitted to see. She had been little better than this man's slave for over twenty years, the victim of his lusts, his whims, his tempers and his delicate heart, the peg on which to hang his disappointments, the doormat for him to kick out of the way in his rages. She had lost youth and hope and love in his ungrateful service; at times she almost hated him, and yet, now that the hand was weakening on the reins, now that she realized that she could, if she would, take the bit between her teeth, she jibbed like a frightened mare; it was too late. There had been something in his almost humble half-explanation that brought his illness home to her as no fits of irritability or silence could have done. "Never mind, my dear," she said gently; "you've done everything for the best." He looked at her with frightened eyes and edged nearer.